Getting a NAS (and setting up a Pi-hole)

2025 has begun, and I've been seriously considering investing in a NAS with redundancy features to offload my garbage to where it's safe and reliable, but I'll get to that later.

I've been considering a NAS for a long time already, as far as back in 2019, hearing about its pros and cons, but didn't have the budget yet. Not to mention all the sufficient technical know-how to set up a NAS properly in the first place.

Another reason why I'm getting a NAS is for ingesting footage; something like conventions, B-rolls shot in 4K, or whatever, since I have plans to have everything automated and for editing with all the proxy files readily available. And now that I currently have 3 external hard drives: which are a single 1TB drive and two 2TB drives - amassing over 5TB total disk usage, I've used 3.8TB of garbage respectively; it's time to consider investing in a NAS as soon as possible.

The beginner setup

After a ton of research and considerations for my use cases, I'll start with a 4-bay NAS; with both of my options currently being Synology DS923+ and UGREEN NASync DXP4800. And have two Seagate IronWolf 8TB drives with RAID 1 configuration for my current use case and will expand for more in the future.

Besides storage, the NAS will serve as an entertainment repository; instead of Plex, I'll use Jellyfin, an open-source alternative to Plex and have tried it on my local network once, and it's sufficient for my needs. However, I can't get certain movies to enable subtitles, even with embedded subtitles.

This should be enough for migrating data off my external hard drives and, for now, serves as a backup. I am fully aware that all the RAID stuff is not a backup solution but rather a redundancy on one of the drives. So, if a catastrophic event ever happens, my choice for remote backup is Backblaze B2 because of its quick retrieval for said events.

Other concerns

When my family got a proper computer setup, I didn't know it was common to have a computer plugged into an AVR - an automatic voltage regulator. This leads me to assume that I live in a country where power outages are frequent. For that, I also own a NAS-compatible UPS with AVR functionality... if there's such an all-in-one thing, of course; otherwise, a separate NAS-compatible UPS and a standalone AVR would work too.

I've considered more than just my NAS; such as Pi-hole! Having YouTube and Spotify Premium is nice and all, but I want to keep my subscriptions to a minimum of what I need. Especially the 6 bucks/month for the Backblaze B2 backup for my NAS, and my cheap 50GB iCloud+ subscription for my iPhone, which is just enough for my essentials.

However, the roadblock for this NAS/Pi-hole setup will be obtaining a static IP. I haven't dug deep into this since I've fiddled with the router in the past, but my hunch is that there isn't any support after researching my ISP's option for it. I might even have to contact support before going to third-party relay solutions for static IP. Thankfully, NAS has a built-in solution for this and I don't have to worry about it... hopefully.

Here's a visual graph of what my current infrastructure will be like:

I've also been considering whether to provision an SSL certificate for my NAS setup just as an added layer of security and don't want to leave things exposed, and, quite frankly, I don't want to type the IP of my NAS all the time and having to type a domain name is more feasible; bookmarking it is one thing, but I want to access it with an easy-to-remember domain name if I want to access the dashboard from my phone or computer.

Future plans for expansion and longevity

I might upgrade or purchase another NAS with more drive bays for redundancy, archives, and bigger projects. Speaking of archives, I might look into archiving my life's worth onto a tape drive in my 30s to make it last longer. If I have such a budget and/or when I have a lot of data, I extend Backblaze B2 and add AWS S3 Deep Archive for data I rarely access too, like family photos, old files, and video assets.

I'm taking an ambitious route to do more than a 3-2-1 rule but have 2 off-site copies from tape drives and a backup NAS in the future; a 3-4-2 rule, if you will. The latter "4" is from Backblaze B2, S3 Deep Archive, the NAS itself, and tape drives. However, getting into archiving files from a tape drive is an entire rabbit hole to get into, and it's the least of my concerns at the moment. Maybe I'll consider it once I'm in my midlife crisis, who knows?

Wrapping things up

So, in short, I really value my data a lot. All the memories and the garbage from memes and camera rolls I took back then. Without it, I would basically lose 1/3 of my life. That's why I put my data in genuinely high regard and safety. But in the future, here's my dream setup for my home server if I ever have the budget:

While my current NAS setup is kept basic for the time being, there will come a certain point when I'll use network switches with this tremendous scale; not to mention the amount of data and workload that I poured my everything into my new gateway into the home networking territory, or just IT in general. Just like all things, you gotta start from somewhere, right?

Either way, the earliest experience dealing with networking was setting up a mesh WiFi which was tedious, but relatively easy to get it up and running!